-Transcript-
Thank you for joining me today. Welcome back to the cafe. Good to be here today. It’s always good to be here. I’m so excited. We are talking about fellowship with Jesus ChristOur Lord and Savior today, fellowship with God Almighty. How do we have it? You know, the Bible gives us prescription for us, as Believers for the saved, Christians on how to have fellowship with Jesus, and I’m going to read it to you in whole 1 John 1, 1 John1:1 “that, which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our in our eyes,which we’ve look uponin our hands oh handled of the word of life“. So in verse 1, 1 John 1, In verse 1, of 1 John 1, we’re seeing right away. He has been there with the Lord. He understands that he seen with His eyes. He’s looked upon Him. He’s had His hands on Him. He knows the word of life. That’s Jesus Christ. Verse 2 “”For the life was manifested and we have seen it and bear witness and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the father and was manifested unto us. What is manifested mean? That means shown magnified like, under a microscope. Verse 3 “that which we have seen and heard declare we unto You, that He also may have fellowship with us and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” And these things, right we unto you that your joy may be good. Amen. So John is saying, frankly, we’re gonna share with you what we know about having fellowship, with the Brethren. And most importantly, with Jesus Christ with the Father, that’s Father God, with His Son, Jesus Christ, how through the working of the Holy Spirit, we’re going to get to exactly this key component of being close to God, because it’s something that you can do, don’t you love it? When there’s something that you can do a lot of times it’s Christians we have to kind of be still and know that he is God and kind of wait on the Lord. Um Yet, here is something we can do. There’s something we can do and I’m excited to share with you here today. And in first John chapter one, it dies right into it in the last five verses here. Verse 5.’ This then is the message which we have heard of Him and declare unto you, that God is light. And in Him is no Darkness at all.” What does that mean? That means God is Holy. He is light and there is no Darkness. There is no reproach. There’s no sin in God at all. He’s 100. Holy Verse 6, “ if we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another and the blood of Jesus Christ”, His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that, we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar. And his word is not in us. All right. Amen. So in these five verses here and latter part of 1 John 1, we see that prescription for having a close walk with God. Having fellowship with God. Have you ever thought to yourself? I just don’t see God in my life. I can’t hear God. I, when I pray, I feel like my prayers are just going nowhere. I just don’t have that. Relationship with God. Maybe I wasn’t chosen. Maybe I’m not special. Maybe I’m not holy enough. Let me tell you what the answer is to this problem or better. Yet what the solution is to this problem. It’s seeking the Lord through confession of sins. Now, to confess us in you first have to know that you are sinning, right? And so, as a saved Christian, we may think that we are very holy and good and we don’t sin. And that’s the first problem. Two times in this short chapter. It tells us that if we say, we haven’t sinned, we’re making God, a liar, and His word is not in us. Um, Let me tell you what you’re a sinner. I’m a sinner. We’re all sinners. We all fall short. And the first step here is recognizing that we have sinned in our lives. Amen. And so, we need to first understand that we have a sin problem. Even when we’re saved, we’re prone to sin and that sin gets in the way of us being close to God. Can you see that here today? That when we have sinned, when we put up that wall when we uh come up with this idea that we’re just going to live as a Christian because we’re banking on the promises of God, we’re saved, we know that but we’re not going to go any further. We’re not going to go to Him and repentance. We’re not going to go to Him in submission. We’re not going to go to Him and obedience. We’re just going to be living our life and we’re safe. We know we’re honestly safe, we believe in Jesus. We’ve seen uh we’ve seen the Holy Spirit move we’ve seen God move but we’re not going to go any further here when we’re in that kind of rocksaw position, we are hurting ourselves and we are keeping God at a far distance and yet, God loves us so much. He wants to walk closely with us. He wants you to have that Victorious life that victory over sin and he gives the prescription for it. It’s very simple. He says, look this is what you do through through John here. He’s very simple. What do we do? We realize the consequence of unconfessed sin as we see in verses 5 and 6. The first John 1. This then is the mess with. We have heard of Him and declaring to you, that God is light and in Him, is no Darkness at all. So, if there’s no Darkness at all, you can’t be bringing Darkness to God. And Him saying, let me pat you on the back. Everything’s okay. And well, and good, there can’t be verse six. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. So here clearly it says that we cannot have fellowship with God. And by the way, I would say the Brethren as well, right? Because he mentions the Brethren in here. We can’t have close relationship with Christians and God Himself if we’re walking in darkness, if we’re living in sin and you you might say well brother Clark you said we all sin. That’s correct. So how do we remedy that? How do we fix that? We must confess our sins. We must go to God in Repentance of our sins. We must do that perpetually. You know the Bible says, pray without ceasing. You know what part of those prayers without ceasing throughout the day should be confession of our sins, we need to remove the pride from us and just go to God humbly immediately when you know, the Holy Spirit will convict you of what you might have done to transgress to sin. And as you grow closer to God, you can ask Him to do this. If not, as you read the word. And as you look around, you can say, you know what? Lying as a sin. And I told Eli yesterday, I must confess to God for that or adultery is a sin, and I’ve lusted after someone, I must confess to God or coveting as a sin. I’ve been coveting after this thing or that thing and I must confess to God, we go to God with our with our sins. We say, Lord, please forgive us. We recognize this sin as what you see it for this awful, unholy thing, that’s keeping us from you and and we just go and agree with you on that. We ask you for forgiveness and we ask you to that to help us never to do it again. We recognize us in and we move forward in faith that it’s been forgiven. And so we have to have that confession of sins. We have to realize that when we confess our sins, what does this say here? It’s a beautiful verse in verse 9. This is amazing. Think about this. If we confess our sins, He he being God is faithful and just to forgive us, our sins and the cleanse us from all unrighteousness, all unrighteousness, wholesale, everything all unrighteousness is cleansed when we bring it to Him. So let me ask you this question. If you’re going to the Lord and Repentance throughout the day, each day as things happen. You ask Him for forgiveness and you mean it, you identify the sin and you understand that it is a sin, you don’t want to send anymore, you have a pure heart about you in that regard. And you mean it hear the scripture says He’ll forgive you. So if you’ll forgive you, how could he be far off? If that is what you’re doing throughout your day and throughout your life? Well, He can be because he will draw near to you. As you cleanse your hands, as you go to Him and repentance, He will draw near to you and you will have a walk with God. That people will envy. You’ll be very close to God, not because of anything that you’ve done. In terms of works or in terms of Good Deeds? No, it’s simply the only thing you’ve done. Is you’ve just humbled up, you said go ahead and cut me off a huge piece of that humble pie, I’m gonna go before the Lord, and I’m gonna say, hey, you know what? Lord please, if I have sinned, I need to know what it is. Lord reveal it to me, help me understand it because we have to understand, you know God won’t force us on us. There is a willful ignorance that many people live by including Christians where they just don’t want to know, kind of don’t see. Don’t tell type of thing. Well, guess what? God sees all and He’ll tell all and what we need to do is not be willfully, ignorant, but but be enough spiritual about have enough spirituality about us to say, we know what, we don’t know, right? And we need your help. God, we need a working in our heart. Can you imagine if this country, if every Christian, not not every person. But, every, born-again believer went to the Lord today and humbled themselves before the Lord and sought Him and begged Him for forgiveness of their sins and asked Him to draw. Close to them. Can you imagine what happened to this country? Can you imagine the revival that would break out the blessings? That would come from it? I truly believe God is more than willing to heal our land. If we will seek his face, if we will humble ourselves and call upon Him, you know, in the verse that I’m paraphrasing, doesn’t talk about the unbeliever, it’s talking about the believer. And so what we must do is look as Believers to God each day to repent for our sins. To go to Him and say, Lord, please forgive us for what we’ve done, you know, I don’t think there can be too much repentance in fact often, it’s not enough and here. What’s going on in 1 John 1, it is a prescription for fellowship with the Lord and with the Brethren it’s saying look, it’s so simple to dissect, the analyze. It really is. Uh, 1 John 1 is simply saying We have a Father that wants to forgive us, our sins, that is 100% Holy and needs us to repent of our sins for fellowship. Now, let me make a disclaimer. Someone listening to, this may say, are you saying you have to be perfect and repentant to be saved? Absolutely, not as I started, the message with, I’m saying that once you’re saved in order to have fellowship or closeness with uh God the Father, you must seek His forgiveness for your sins and repent and change your ways so you don’t sin anymore. That’s pretty much common sense. If you have a family member let’s say you have a dad and you want to be close to the dad and the dad is a set of rules and you constantly break those rules and you never stop breaking those rules. He’s still your dad, right? He’s not going to suck a change in being your dad, but you’re probably not going to be too close to them because you’re constantly breaking his rules, right? I know that’s a simple example but that’s what we’re talking about here is fellowship. Oh, and why would you want to be close to the Lord? Well, let’s, let’s think about why joy, peace, just tranquility, understanding, discernment, His Spirit nearby, His love, changing you from a person that would have inward desires for yourself to changing you, to think like Jesus, it was all about others. Making you more obedient molding, you more into who Christ is every day. That’s what happens when you repent now, Jesus, we don’t can’t use Him as an example for repentance because He was perfect, right? He didn’t sin. He was He did the will of His father. Amen. He’s God In the Flesh. So what we can only do is look to people like John who wrote here in the New Testament. 1 John 1 exactly what we need to do in verse 9. “If we confess our sins, He’s faithful and just to forgive us, our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” Then we have to understand that once we’ve gone to the Lord, In confession, going to the Lord and repented of our sins. He cleanses us from it, what that means is it’s done, that does not mean that it’s going to come back. That does not mean that that one day, Lord’s going to revisit it and say, well, I forgave you of that season, but now I’m going to come back and revisit it. No once forgiven, it’s always forgiven. Amen. And so, we need to understand that this is not an ongoing process. If you’ve done something bad in your life, maybe lately, as you listen to this, you’re thinking, oh man, he’s preaching on repentance. I’ve really messed up lately. Maybe you’ve done something awful. And you go to God. And and I’m telling you, as on the authority of God’s word, if you go to Him and you repent one time in full sincerity and you recognize the sin and you bring it before the Lord, and it’s forgiven. And it’s, uh, castaway to be forgotten about forever. It is forever gone. And so, if that comes back up in your mind, after you’ve gone to the Lord for repentance, He’s received it. If it comes back to your mind, that’s the devil trying to bring it back up. That’s the devil trying to hold you back because God is faithful and just to cleanse us of all our sins and unrighteousness when we go to Him. So let’s go to Him today. Let’s start today repenting of our sins, giving it to Him so we can have that close walk with him and so we can have that With him that we desire. And so that we can do great works for Him and bear fruit. As we grow closer to Him through a constant steady stream of praying and repenting. Thank you for joining me. Take care and God bless.